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(music) ("In The Sky With Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy)
Steven: We're in Washington D.C. on the mall
at the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial.
Beth: With is situated right between
the Washington Monument and the Lincolcn Memorial.
Maya Lin, the architect of the memorial
sought about uniting the memorial to the nation's past,
bringing together the past and the present.
Steven: It's this very long series of
slabs of stone, this highly-reflective black granite
that actually points to both of those monuments.
Beth: Although the architect didn't like to
refer to these as walls, in a way they are walls,
but it's very thin, sunk into the ground
and inscribed with the names of
the servicemen who died in the Vietnam War.
Steven: Now there are more than 58,000 names
and in fact, more names are being added.
It is overwhelming in the density of names.
What happens as you walk down this path,
you sink into the earth.
The earth opens up and reveals these names.
Because the surface of the stone is so reflective,
it becomes a mirror and really all that
seems to have substance is
the rougher surface of the names themselves.
Beth: Maya Lin's idea was that it was the names
that were the reality, the substance of the monument
and that the reflectivity of the granite
opened up into another world that we could not enter,
but which was there for us to see.
Steven: She describes when she first visited the site
that she wanted to reveal that edge.
Beth: In fact, she said, "I had a simple impulse
to cut into the earth. I imagined taking a knife
and cutting into the earth, opening it up
and initial violence and pain that in time would heal."
She writes,"That the experience of the monument
would help people to come to terms
with the death of their loved ones."
Steven: There is a real journey involved here.
You walk down in, you find the name
of your loved one embedded within
the chronological sequence of the death
of all of these soldiers, and then you walk back out.
Beth: That's right. In the center,
the chronology begins and goes down toward the right
as we're facing the wall and then picks up again
on the low edge of the left side
and then towards the center again.
As we move down the center, the path widens
and the granite rises more than 10 feet above us.
Steven: The names become a symbol of
this person multiplied more than 58,000 times,
but even though you've got that abstraction,
you also have this very concrete reality.
You have this place for family to come,
to gather, to reflect on that name.
Beth: Maya Lin talks about the name as
an abstraction that in fact, means more to
family and loved ones than a picture.
The picture represents someone at
a particular time and a particular place
as one moment in their lives whereas a name
might recall everything about that person.
Steven: There is this powerful accumulation
of all of the names.
As you descend, as you walk into the densest middle
of the monument, it becomes absolutely overwhelming.
Beth: It's a very different experience than
most previous war memorials.
When we think about the history of war memorials,
we often think about memorials to military heroes like
the monument to Lord Nelson in Trafalgar Square
or we might think about the Shaw memorial by
Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the National Gallery
where you have a hero leading an
anonymous army with an allegorical figure
representing peace and death,
this combination of allegory and heroism
that's usually in memorials,
it's completely absent here.
Steven: How can one create a meaningful monument
in the late 20th century?
What does it mean to strip away all of the
representational form?
What does it mean to create something so
subconsciously abstract and yet also so
powerful and so meaningful?
Beth: Evidently the committee that judged this
decided that this abstraction would be best.
It's interesting to think about how the committee
didn't know who was Maya Lin was.
There were 1,400 entries, completely anonymous.
Maya Lin at that point, was an undergraduate at Yale,
she was an architecture student, she's an Asian American.
It's interesting to think about what
might have happened had they known
who this application was from.
Steven: Once her identity had been revealed,
there was real backlash and racism.
There was backlash also about the abstraction.
Ultimately that was resolved by
a much more naturalistic sculpture
adjacent to the main memorial.
Beth: One that shows soldiers in a
very naturalistic way, three-dimensionally,
which is also powerful, but in a way that
feels much more public and far less intimate.
Steven: Maya Lin was brilliant in creating
a public space and yet tremendous intimacy.
We can feel those names inscribed.
The active reading is to come close,
to internalize those names.
Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial is one of the most
successful memorials in the nation.
Beth: And apparently one of the most visited
monuments in Washington D.C.
In an article that was published much later,
writing about her ideas for the monument,
Maya Lin said, "It would be an interface between
our world and the quieter, darker,
more peaceful world beyond.
I chose black granite in order to make
the surface reflective and peaceful.
I never looked at the memorial as a wall,
an object, but as an edge to the earth,
an opened side. The mirrored sect would
double the size of the park creating two worlds;
one we are part of and one we cannot enter."
Steven: Even that black granite created controversy.
She also talked about how she couldn't
expect granite that came from Canada
or from Sweden, two countries that had
really good quality black granite because
there was too much political baggage because
draft dodgers had gone to both of those countries.
Beth: One opponent of her design said,
"One needs no artistic education to see
this memorial designed for what it is,
a black scar and a hole hidden, as if out of shame."
No, I think this is very different than what
Maya Lin intended for the wall.
She specifically took an apolitical approach
and wanted the design to be about those veterans
who had sacrificed their lives and not about
the political controversy at all;
not about whether if the was was
something shameful or something honorable.
Steven: The country had not only fought the war,
but then fought itself over the meaning of the war.
Maya Lin was very wise in sidestepping that
and putting to the fore simply the names,
the numerical power of all those fallen.
Beth: And she wrote, "The wall dematerializes
of the form and allows the names
to become the object. Pure and reflective
surfaces that would allow visitors
the chance to see themselves with the name."
(music) ("In The Sky With Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy)